January 14-21, 2005

San Diego, Still Standing (and otherwise)

After our whirlwind visit to Los Angeles in October 2004,
we headed south to San Diego for the NAB Radio Show - and, of
course, to visit some towers, too. We'd done a pretty comprehensive
survey of the town in a
visit in 2001, but things change, and it was a beautiful
sunny day (as most days in San Diego tend to be), so we headed
out to revisit a few sites and see what had changed.

First stop was the two towers of KOGO (600), the big 5 kW
signal that booms forth from the vicinity of Highway 94 a few
miles east of downtown. This time around, we found the entrance
to the site that had eluded us in 2001, only to be greeted by
a big gate and a very nicely-done ASRN sign. (And it's not as
though you can't see the site well from the gate, including the
FM antennas for KSON-FM 97.3 atop one tower and KLNV 106.5 atop
the other.)

KOGO
sits south of Highway 94 - and to the north, along 52nd Street,
is the tall tower that's home to San Diego's AM 1360, a Clear
Channel sister station to KOGO. 1360 was historically KGB, later
KCNN and KPQP, and when we visited in 2001 it was standards as
KPOP. A few months before our 2004 visit, it had flipped again,
and it's now running progressive talk (not just Air America and
Ed Schultz but a local show as well) as KLSD.

The KGB calls live on on the FM side, at 101.5 from those
eight bays at the top of the tower. And one big reason we wanted
to stop and see this tower again this time is that there's still
another station calling it home. It's not tremendously clear
from the photo, but if you look carefully you can see a dark
diagonal wire stretching down to the left of the tower. That's
not a guy wire (the guys on this tower are white and made of
non-conductive Phillystran) - it's the temporary longwire antenna
for Salem's KCBQ (1170), which lost its six-tower site out in
Santee and still hasn't completed its rebuild as a diplexed operation
at the site of KECR (910 El Cajon), north of Santee. So for the
moment, this tower at 52nd and Kalmia (an intersection we need
to visit once more on a future trip, in hopes of picking out
the transmitter building, which we now know to be disguised as
a ranch house) carries both the lefty ramblings of Al Franken
and the righty rantings of Bill Bennett. An interesting combination!

Our
2004 trip had time for only a distant glimpse of the 442-foot
self-supporting tower of KSON (1240) and KURS (1040) south of
downtown in National City. We'd photographed this beautiful behemoth
in 2001 and admired the nifty call letters it displayed, and
it was disheartening indeed to get word a few weeks ago that
the top half of the tower had crumpled over in a storm just after
Christmas.

Bill Lipis kindly sent along a view of the tower as it appeared
the next morning - and what a sight that must have been for commuters
on busy I-5, which runs right alongside the police impound lot
where the tower stood for so many years.

The good news is that the tower wasn't completely destroyed,
and within less than 48 hours KSON was back on the air after
crews had carefully removed the crumpled portion of the tower
(and, sadly, the call letters.) KURS, which shared the tower,
has yet to return to the air, and low-power KBNT-CA (Channel
17) moved to a new site at Mount San Miguel after the accident.

The story of KSON's return to the airwaves was a dramatic
one, and you can read a first-hand account from chief engineer
John Buffaloe (who's since moved on to Clear Channel in New Orleans)
at the SBE
Chapter 36 website. Who said engineering wasn't exciting?

In our next installment, we'll fill in a big gap in our Southern
California tower hunting. No, we didn't go to El Centro (where
KXO lost its tower as well last fall), or to Palm
Springs, but we did make it to North County San Diego, and you'll
see those towers right here in a week.

It's here - the 2005
Tower Site Calendar is now shipping! Click
here for ordering information!